2. A White Irish man can pass for a White English man while a Black man cannot. Racism is systematic discrimination because of race. It was established long before nationality and religious bigotry existed.

3. I don’t ever remember the Irish being considered to be 3/5 human. Neither the Irish or Jews banned from go to see certain movies because of the color of their skin.

4. So the Irish were discriminated against…but then what happened? They integrated with the greater white society and became indistinguishable from the dominant group in society

5. Irish slaves had rights in America Way before Negro slaves.

6. When you show me pictures of iron frozen into an Irishman’s mouth and chained to keep him docile like an animal and pictures of Irishmen hung from trees then I will listen.

7. Discrimination based on nationality =/= discrimination based on race.

8. Irish immigrants had a choice to come to America

9. How do you racially profile an Irish person when they look exactly like the White person doing the profiling?

10. “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” ~MLK

11. Dismissive White entitlements

12. What you don’t know is that race is not a biological unit. It is a cultural one. There is no ‘superior’ genetic race because, from a biological point of view, there is no race. The further from white you are the more likely you are to die violently, be issued a bad loan, be refused a job, and go to jail. Even if we get rid of racism on the personal level we live in a racist society in a racist set of systems. If we want to ‘move’ past racism we need to recognize it for what it is, where it is, and work against it. It is always so lovely to hear that ‘it doesn’t exist,’ or ‘I’m color blind.

13. “LINGERING EFFECTS OF SLAVERY” means that the ill’s of slavery still exist. CASE AND POINT: Black people still have the SLAVE MASTERS LAST NAMES; Jones,Jackson, Smith, etc.,. These were the names of the plantation owners whom my ancestor’s were enslaved too. Now in terms of race mixing what you (daniel) don’t realize is that the Black gene is dominate and has the power of Genetic Annihilation. Meaning when we mix with sub-specie”s(whites,yellow asians,mexicans) there lineage vanishes by eliminating the recessive gene. Furthermore, we will continue too use the internet to WAKE ALL BLACK PEOPLE UP AND THERE ISN’T ANYTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT! So get over it!

14. Every Black child in grade school is taught Adolph Hitler killed six million Jews and is the worst human being that ever lived. On the other hand our children are taught “The Right Honorable” Cecil Rhodes the founder of the De Beer diamond company in South Africa who killed ten times that number of Africans is a hero and a statesman and if they study hard and do well in school they may be eligible to win Rhodes Scholarships the oldest and most celebrated international fellowship awards in the world. They don’t mention the scholarships are paid for with the blood of their ancestors.

15. Let me first explain the difference between Indentured Servitude and Slavery: Servants typically worked four to seven years in exchange for passage, room, board, lodging and freedom dues. While the life of an indentured servant was harsh and restrictive, it wasn’t slavery. There were laws that protected some of their rights.

16. It’s unclear how the fact that Irish people were once discriminated against is pertinent to this discussion

17. Neo-Nazis, White Nationalists, Neo-Confederates, and even Holocaust deniers, while racist trolls have deployed the myth to attack the Black Lives Matter movement. More worrisome, though, is its widespread adoption by principally American Internet users as if it were a point of “Irish pride.”

18. What’s your academic background particularly as it applies to the study of systems of slavery?

20. The “Irish slaves” trend is a subset of “white slavery” contemporary discourse which emphasizes class over race, fueled by a potent cocktail of bad history, false equivalence, conspiracy theories, and reductionist fallacies.

21. The “Irish were slaves too” retort had become one of the most popular obfuscation tactics on the social web.

22. There is almost no situation where “Irish were slaves too” is not used to derail discussions about the legacy of slavery and ongoing anti-black racism. Starting with Ferguson and with almost every subsequent police killing of an unarmed Black person from late 2014 through 2015, this phrase is used to mock and denigrate the Black Lives Matter movement.

23. So you’re arguing all European indentured servants, child laborers, convicts, free laborers, impressed sailors, the poor and the general working class population were unequivocally “white slaves” and “white guilt” is an invention of the elite and poor white Americans also deserve reparations because their ancestors also endured “slavery”?

24. So you’re equating white servitude and black slavery in terms of scale, duration, type and legacy in an effort to deny reparations for slavery in America?

25. You’re using the exact same tactics used by contemporaries to justify the transatlantic slave trade and to defend the institution of racialized perpetual hereditary chattel slavery in the Antebellum South and the Anglo-Caribbean, right?

26. The policy of forced transportation to the colonies in the 1650s, which included an estimated 10,000 Irish people understandably, scars our collective memory and of course it deserves both respect and close attention from anyone interested in the history of unfree labor systems in the Atlantic world.

27. Prior to the sugar revolution and the massive investment by Europeans in enslaving and dehumanizing African people, the living and working conditions of servants and slaves were similar. As the British colonies transitioned to large-scale sugar plantations both groups were exploited for profit, indentured servants for decades compared to centuries for enslaved Africans.

28. The sentiment ‘there were Irish slaves too, but we moved on’ speaks to the racist essence of white nationalism. Various groups of Neo-Nazis posit why whites can overcome a “worse” situation than blacks and “do not whine about it.” So the “get over it” racism that so often accompanies the meme is not about history at all. It goes much deeper than that. Their belief is that non-whites can’t move on due to racial inferiority or social pathology.

29. Through false equivalence and erasure, you’re attempting to remove history as a determinant so you can claim the current socioeconomic position and mass incarceration of Black people in the U.S. is due to racial inferiority.

32. A similar phenomenon in Scotland where a “Scottish slaves” narrative is evoked to avoid confronting their considerable history of involvement in race-based plantation slavery in the ‘New World’.

33. Indentured servants were not branded like African slaves on their arrival in the colonies. The tattoo design you might see on social media was based on a stamp of the East India Company or the RAC African Trading Company, not a branding iron.

34. The comfort and ease at which some Irish and Irish-Americans appropriate the history of black chattel slavery is remarkable and disturbing.

35. “it was no more [a] sin to kill an Irishman than a dog or any other brute.” This quote is not from the seventeenth century but the fourteenth, which makes it a full 300 years out of context.

36. The HMS Glendower was not a slave ship. In fact it was used from 1821 to 1824 to suppress the slave trade.

37. Lifetime African slave ownership vs. 4–7 years indentures, and slave-owners also claimed their African slave’s children as their property.

38. The claim “African slaves were treated much better in Colonial America” is racist propaganda.

39. The ratio of women to men was very low in the colony and so for the benefit of the colonial project, a shipment was arranged by Virginia Company “of a hundred willing maids, to be sold to the planters who could afford to buy a wife.” This does not depict Irish women being sold into slavery. It depicts English women being sold into marriage with the planter was paying for the transport costs.

40. The “Irish slaves” meme you so frequently see on social media is used to deny the existence of White privilege. It is often accompanied by an image of the Damm family taken by the photographer Mary Ellen Mark in Los Angeles in 1987.

41. Answer me this, on 1865 the 13th Amendment was passed, how many “Irish slaves” we freed?

42. The comfort and ease at which some Irish and Irish-Americans appropriate the history of black chattel slavery is remarkable and disturbing.

43. There is no evidence of Irish chattel slavery in the North American colonies. There were a large number of Irish indentured servants, and there were cases in which Irish men and women were sentenced to indentured servitude in the “new world” and forcibly shipped across the Atlantic. But even involuntary laborers had more autonomy than enslaved Africans, and the large majority of Irish indentured servants came here voluntarily.

44. The term “white slaves” emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, first as a derogatory term for Irish laborers—equating their social position to that of slaves—later as political rhetoric in Ireland itself, and later still as Southern pro-slavery propaganda against an industrialized North.

45. Indentured servitude was difficult, deadly work, and many indentured servants died before their terms were over. But indentured servitude was temporary, with a beginning and an end. Those who survived their terms received their freedom. Servants could even petition for early release due to mistreatment, and colonial lawmakers established different, often lesser, punishments for disobedient servants compared to disobedient slaves. Above all, indentured servitude wasn’t hereditary. The children of servants were free; the children of slaves were property.

46. Even if many Irish immigrants faced discrimination and hard lives on these shores, it doesn’t change the fact that American slavery—hereditary and race-based—was a massive institution that shaped and defined the political economy of colonial America, and later, the United States. Nor does it change the fact that this institution left a profound legacy for the descendants of enslaved Africans, who even after emancipation were subject to almost a century of violence, disenfranchisement, and pervasive oppression, with social, economic, and cultural effects that persist to the present.

47. African tribes sold other African’s; this is a classic “two wrongs make a right” ethical proposition. Even if Africans colluded in the slave trade, you feel White Americans were entitled to do whatever they pleased with the people who were unlucky enough to fall victim?

48. Even if Anthony Johnson was the first person in the North American colonies to hold a slave—even if many black people across the years held slaves—that doesn’t erase the fact that it was the racially based system of hereditary slavery that harmed the vast majority of black people living within it. The fact that some members of an oppressed class participate in oppression doesn’t excuse that oppression.

49. According to the 1860 census, taken just before the Civil War, more than 32 percent of white families in the soon-to-be Confederate states owned slaves. By most measures, this isn’t “small”—it’s roughly the same percentage of Americans who, today, hold a college degree. The large majority of slaveholding families were small farmers and not the major planters who dominate our image of “slavery.”

50. You’re throwing out the Irish “the first slaves” slogan you read on social media as a way to derail conversations about slavery and modern-day racism.

51. Historically, the majority of Irish prisoners of war, vagrants and other victims of kidnapping and deception, thought to have numbered around 10,000 people were forcibly sent to the West Indies in the 1650s. Those who survived were pardoned by Charles II in 1660. In contrast, the transatlantic slave trade lasted for four centuries, was the largest forced migration in world history, involving tens of millions of Africans who were completely dehumanized, and its poisonous legacy remains in the form of anti-black racism. So this neo-Nazi propaganda is false equivalency on an outrageous scale.

52. The plight of the indentured Irish, however painful, was not racialized and their status was sometimes voluntary, with a migrant working for free for a period of time to pay off the cost of their trip across the Atlantic. Indentured servitude was a widespread practice at the time, so it is difficult to ascertain the exact number of Irish affected by it. Estimates between 1630 and 1775, 165,000 Irish migrated from Ireland to the British colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean. Of course, not all of these would have been indentured.

53. The idea of Irish slaves has no historical foundation. The Irish slave myth is not supported by the historical evidence. Thousands of Irish were sent to colonies like Barbados against their will, never to return. “Upon their arrival, however, they were socially and legally distinct from the enslaved Africans with whom they often labored.

54. While indentured servitude would be regarded by contemporary standards as slavery, it was less violent than the transatlantic slave trade out of Africa. The Irish, because of the color of their skin, had preferential treatment and pathways out unavailable to black slaves

55. The Irish slave idea seems to be coming from a point of division and not from one of empathy. These memes actually diminish the Irish experience of indentured servitude in the Americas by turning a sad history into a token of race oppression.”

56. Let’s separate the fact from the fiction: the Irish—despite a recent and widely accepted myth—were never, ever American slaves.

57. So next time you feel the urge to bring up Irish slavery while arguing about racial oppression, be a dear and take a moment to check yourself. The plight of the Irish, though real, in no way diminishes the current, long-running struggle of other ethnic groups. Besides, the motherland is currently doing a good enough job oppressing its own people—no need to pay that hatred forward.

58. The fact is that the Irish were indentured servants, and indentured servitude was nothing compared to the harshness and brutality of Black slavery. Indentured servitude was no picnic, but it was a form of debt reimbursement with a set time and a contract agreed on by both parties. Many people agreed to these terms in order to travel to the new world and start over. In the 17th century, the East India Company was notorious for providing contracts to the desperate to get cheap labor for the burgeoning colonies.

59. In Louisiana there were laws in place to protect the rights of the indentured. And at the end of their contract, the newly freed servants may have gained at least 25 acres of land, a year’s worth of corn, arms, a cow and new clothes. In many cases, the former Irish indentured servants would buy enslaved Africans to work their land.

60. “LINGERING EFFECTS OF SLAVERY” means that the ill’s of slavery still exist. CASE IN POINT: Black people still have the SLAVE MASTERS LAST NAMES; Jones,Jackson, Smith, etc.,. These were the names of the plantation owners whom my ancestor’s were enslaved too. Now in terms of race mixing what you (daniel) don’t realize is that the Black gene is dominate and has the power of Genetic Annihilation. Meaning when we mix with sub-specie”s(whites,yellow asians,mexicans) there lineage vanishes by eliminating the recessive gene. Furthermore, we will continue too use the internet to WAKE ALL BLACK PEOPLE UP AND THERE ISN’T ANYTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT! So get over it!

61. Every black child in grade school is taught Adolph Hitler killed six million Jews and is the worst human being that ever lived. On the other hand our children are taught “The Right Honorable” Cecil Rhodes the founder of the De Beer diamond company in South Africa who killed ten times that number of Africans is a hero and a statesman and if they study hard and do well in school they may be eligible to win Rhodes Scholarships the oldest and most celebrated international fellowship awards in the world. They don’t mention the scholarships are paid for with the blood of their ancestors.

62. The Irish slave myth’s appeal reveals an essential element of racist thought, and the way those beliefs are exploited to justify discriminatory laws. Through false equivalence and erasure, you’re attempting to remove history as a determinant so yiu can claim the current socioeconomic position and mass incarceration of Black people in the U.S. is due to racial inferiority.”

63. King Leopold II of Belgium is Europe’s forgotten ‘Hitler’. King Leopold owned the world’s largest plantation registering 76 times the size of Belgium and possessing rich mineral and agricultural resources. Leopold turned it into his own personal part-plantation, part-concentration camp and part-Christian ministry. When we learn about Africa in the U.S., we learn about a caricatured Egypt, the HIV epidemic, the surface level effects of the slave trade, and if you went to a good school perhaps something about South African Apartheid, yet the west erased it from history. By 1924 ten (10) million Congolese Africans had been killed. When you kill ten million Africans — you aren’t called ‘Hitler’, your name never comes to symbolize the living incarnation of evil, and your picture doesn’t produce fear, hatred, and sorrow — rather your crimes are simply swept under the historical rug and the victims of colonialism/imperialism remain forever voiceless.

64. These are the same people who think it’s the job of police to protect us and the military to defend us, when in reality they’re were bred to be attack dogs ….

65. You’re throwing out the Irish “the first slaves” slogan you read on social media as a way to derail conversations about slavery and modern-day racism.

67. The term Semitic (from the biblical “Shem”, Hebrew: שם) was first used in 1848 to refer to a family of languages native to West Asia (the Middle East).

68. Antisemitic – the term was popularized in Germany in 1873 as a scientific-sounding term for Judenhass (Jew-hatred).

69. How did antisemitic became; “anti-Jew” when it encompasses so many different types of people? And how is it possible anyone who questions Zionist media and school trained propaganda is instantly anti-Semitic?

70. Is it anti-black to look to see if blacks owned slaves? Is it anti 1st nations to look and see if we natives did commit genocide against other natives before colonization? Is it anti peace to look into Mandela’s past to see what he supported or if he did in fact co-opt the African movement for a more peaceful corporate state ownership? Is it anti women to study the history of corporate sold feminism?

71. Of course it is according to those who wish to believe all $tate mandated propaganda!!!!!

73. It’s a naive sentiment to say get over it, because you don’t even know what you want people to get over. Slavery was an exploitative system that built global capitalism through the theft, kidnapping, torture and prison labor of millions of Africans. The auction blocks, the rapes, whippings and lynching’s, the slave patrols, the backbreaking and life-ending labor at gunpoint, the separation of families all inflicted psychological damage on the victims and their descendants.

74. In a #BlackLivesMatter era, more attention is paid to the legacy of slavery and its significance in the present day. “Police have been killing and abusing Black people with impunity for centuries, and now thanks to dash-cams, cell phone videos, and public outrage (Black Lives Matter), this problem is now getting the attention it deserves.
75. Never trust anyone who says they do not see color, this means “ you are invisible” ~ Nayyirah Waheed